Successful Application of Cryogenic Pressure Sensitive Paint Technique at ETW

Pressure-Sensitive Paint (PSP) applied to the wing surface of a full-span airplane model was tested in the European Transonic Windtunnel (ETW) at cryogenic conditions. To deal with the issues caused by the model deformation between wind-on and reference conditions, a two-gate lifetime-based PSP method was used. The measurements were performed at test conditions in the temperature range from 115K to 296 K, at M = 0.85 and a total pressure up to 345 kPa. The maximum Reynolds number achieved in these tests was 42.5x106. The obtained PSP results successfully visualize the complex pressure distribution on the model wing surface and the quantitative agreement with conventional pressure tap data was good.